Software Process Assessment and Improvement from a
Decision Making Perspective

by Miklós Biró
and Piroska Turchányi

The quality of the process determines the quality of the
product. This slogan is becoming more and more accepted
in industrial production in general and in the software
industry in particular. MTA SZTAKI recognized the
importance of increasing the awareness of the benefits of
software process improvement in Hungary. But managers
making decisions need to be addressed in the language of
business decisions which is mostly different from that of
process quality experts. For this reason, we identified
and analysed the business decision problems which are
supported by various approaches to software quality. Our
next objective is the application of multiple criteria
decision making techniques to software process assessment
and improvement.

The evaluation of the quality of a software product is
one of the basic issues in information technology. A
system of product quality criteria is summarized in the
ISO/IEC 9126 standard. The first level of the criterion
hierarchy contains the following elements: functionality,
reliability, usability, maintainability, portability and
efficiency. The business decisions that are supported by
this standard are as follows:

Does the software requirements specification adequately reflect the user requirements?

Does the developed software satisfy the user requirements?

There are, however, fundamental business decisions which
are not supported by ISO/IEC 9126 or other systems of
product quality criteria and these are the ones which
justify the existence of software process assessment and
improvement approaches:
The customer's decision problem:
- Is the supplier able to sustain the reliability of its production?

The supplier's decision problem:
- How can we improve the reliability of the
production?

ISO 9000 certification is intended to support the
customer's decision by focusing on the process rather
than on the product. Nevertheless, certification provides
little support for the supplier's decision. It is
software process assessment and the corresponding
improvement action plan which serve the fulfillment of
this need.

While the customer's decision problem involved only the
two alternatives, yes or no, the supplier's decision
problem admits a large number of alternative courses of
action the choice among which is supported by the
BOOTSTRAP method for software process assessment and
improvement among other things.

BOOTSTRAP was a European ESPRIT project (5441) completed
in February 1993 by a consortium of European software
companies and universities. The aim of this project was
to develop a method for software process assessment and
improvement. BOOTSTRAP enhanced and refined the method
developed at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI,
Carnegie Mellon University, USA) for software process
assessment of US Department of Defense contractors, and
adapted it to the European software industry, including
the non-defense sector such as administration, banking,
and insurance. Bootstrap designed a very detailed process
quality attribute hierarchy and enhanced the SEI
Questionnaire by taking into account the ISO 9000-3
guidelines for software quality and the ESA (European
Space Agency) PSS-05 software engineering standards.
Additionally, it refined the SEI maturity level algorithm
to be able to calculate a maturity level for each of the
individual process quality attributes. Thus, we get a
process quality profile that provides a
representation of strengths and weaknesses. This quality
profile serves as a quantitative basis for making
decisions on process improvement. Having based the work
on the ISO 9000-3 standard, BOOTSTRAP can calculate wether
85% of the ISO attributes are
satisfied or not. Therefore, BOOTSTRAP can also be used
as a preparation for the ISO certification.

MTA SZTAKI (The Computer and Automation Institute of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences) became the first Central
and Eastern European member of the BOOTSTRAP Institute, a
European Economic Interest Group whose mission is the
continuous development of the BOOTSTRAP methodology. The
SZTAKI BOOTSTRAP team initiated a wide range of actions
for increasing awareness of the importance of software
process improvement in Hungary.